I have a 5 year old Acer Netbook that I bought from Tigerdirect as a reconditioned item. It has worked really good over the 5 years given what I paid for it. Recently it goes through periods where it acts very sluggish and has certain programs (usually internet browsers) freeze up. I defragmented the hard drive, ran spyware software, ran a registery cleaner, all the usual stuff but it still acts this way from time to time.

Does it sound like the harddrive might be going? I know that they have a limited life on them. What kind of life expectancy can I expect from a Netbook, in terms of the harddrive?

I has a similar problem with a Thinkpad, seven years old and the system would work okbut lock up. The drive was on the way out.

Not sure what OS you are using, take a look at the IBM off lease laptops Lenovo brandedthree year old desktops and laptops with win 7 4Gb memory, free UPS shipping no sales tax if not in NC, and one year extended warranty at no extra cost.

Thanks for the reply in both forums, and for the link. THose are more than I can afford right now. XYL will be out of work after next week, so no major spending until she has another job. That includes ARRL renewal and packages to the outgoing QSL bureau unfortunately

You didn't say if you've done a full hardware scan of the HD checking for bad sectors. Do that if you haven't. If you find bad sectors, your HD is failing and you'll want to replace it. HD's are very cheap so if you like your netbook that might be the way to go.

If the HD looks ok, it could be that you have some malware (or legitimate software misbehaving like malware) running in the background and none of your spyware or anti-virus programs can find it. I suggest you back up all your data and try reformatting and reinstalling the operating system. Most, perhaps all, of the Acer netbooks come with a recovery program that will do this for you and restore the system to factory settings. The way it does this is Acer puts a small hidden partition on the HD that contains an image of the OS. When you do a restore, it copies this hidden copy onto your main partition.

If there is no rescue partition or you have to replace the HD, you can install Windows 7 and the performance is acceptable. If you can't afford Windows 7, Xubuntu 12.04 works very well on the Acer netbooks I have.

Thanks for the information, will check out those utilities and see what they show. I am using Firefox as a browser right now. I was using Opera, but it started to bog down a while ago and firefox seemed to run better, but it is now slowing down some also. Might try reinstalling both.

Did a full reset on the netbook this afternoon, which is pretty much reformatting the HD and reinstalling XP. Seems to be running better now. Only installed the really needed programs. Thanks for all of the help so far.

Mechanical hard drives are ALL guaranteed to fail: either tonight, or in ten years, or next week. You just never know exactly when. That is why everyone who has data/photos/docs that they would be upset over if they lost maintain THREE copies of everything: that hard drive in the computer, and external hard drive as a backup, and - in case the first two fail or get lost or stolen - use cloud storage.

SO ... five years' use is within reason ... nothing to get upset with a dealer about. Just install a new one and use your backups to restore data.

Everything built will and is expected to fail. Lol about guarantee. Just be sure that replacing "the machine" will not cause you any grief. Back up all data you want for future use. I no worry, a replacement for me is just a replacement.

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